Remembering Russell
Kirk

September 8,
2005

The
late Russell Kirk was a conservative thinker of
a breed you dont find much anymore. His 1953 classic The
Conservative Mind did much to inspire the conservative intellectual
movement  which you also dont find much
anymore. When
I last spoke to Kirk, near
the end of his life, he had grown disgusted by what was then passing for
conservatism.

Kirks hero was the
Anglo-Irish politician-author Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on
the Revolution in France, one of the great monuments of English
prose and political wisdom. Im only one of many readers who
discovered Burkes nearly Shakespearean eloquence because of Kirk.

Someone said of Burke that he
chose his side like a fanatic but defended it like a philosopher. His visceral
reaction against the French Revolution turned into profound thought after he
was, as he put it, alarmed into reflection. That was Kirk too.

When I got to know Kirk personally,
I found a kind and colorful man living like a country squire, with his lovely wife
and their four teenaged daughters, in a marvelous old house in darkest
Michigan (tiny Mecosta). By then I was writing for Bill Buckleys
National Review, as Kirk had done since the magazines
founding in 1955. We were both to become disillusioned with it.

In 1985 Kirk made a speech to the
Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, in which he quipped
that the neoconservatives  who were then attaching themselves to
the conservative movement  seemed to think that the center of
Western civilization was in Tel Aviv. This caused Midge Decter, the den
mother of the neocons, to accuse Kirk of anti-Semitism.

It was a crude smear. But to my
amazement, National Review didnt defend Kirk, its
oldest and most venerable contributor, against the vicious attack. In fact it
didnt even report what Decter had said. This was to become a
pattern as the neocons made similar charges against Patrick Buchanan, me,
and others who were mildly critical of the state of Israel. This was my
introduction to what you might call ostrich journalism: If we ignore
unpleasant news, our readers will be neer the wiser.
Mustnt risk offending the neocons!

Kirk
must have been deeply hurt. I
didnt have the heart to tell him that Id urged Buckley to say
something  anything  in his behalf, but he could hardly have
failed to notice the loud silence when he needed friends. Ever since, the
neocons have been able to count on National Review to play
along with them. Today it hardly has an identity of its own; it seems just
another neocon organ, forever urging war in the Middle East.

The older conservatives who, with
Kirk, had helped create National Review 50 years ago  James
Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, Willi Schlamm, Whittaker Chambers
 wouldnt recognize it today. Even the Buckleys must wince
when they read it now. It was founded in order to oppose Eisenhower
Republicanism; it currently supports a Republican president far to the left of
Eisenhower.

In Kirks day,
National Review was an exciting magazine, the only one
seriously challenging the liberal consensus. Not content with debating
liberals, it conducted lively debates among conservatives themselves over
basic questions of political philosophy. It was magnetic. Its fearlessness in
those days  it defended Joe McCarthy and Southern segregation
 make a strange contrast to its timidity today.

You could disagree with it (and its
editors often violently disagreed with each other), but its vitality and wicked
humor kept you reading. It once ran a featured article by the great
screenwriter Morrie Ryskind called The Dirtiest Word in the
Language. How could you skip a piece with a title like that? (Ill
save you the trouble of searching the archives: the dirtiest
word, said Ryskind, was minority.)

Ill never forget the date
when I joined the staff: September 11, 1972. I was a very green 26; Bill
Buckley was still in charge, Jim Burnham still guided the editorial section, and
Kirk still wrote a regular column, but most of the other old-timers were long
gone.

Today, any traces of Burkean and
Kirkean conservatism are long gone too. Instead of standing athwart
history yelling Stop!, as it once did, National Review
has joined the revolution.

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